Name:	Robert Franco
Title:	Professor of Anthropology and Director of Institutional Effectiveness
Department:	Office for Institutional Effectiveness
Organization:	Kapiolani Community College
Phone:	(808) 734-9514
Fax:	(808) 734-9443
Email:	bfranco [a] hawaii.edu
Address:	4303 Diamond Head Road Honolulu, HI 96816

Brief Biography:
For 30 years, Dr. Robert Franco has been an ecological and demographic anthropologist focusing on contemporary Hawaiian, Samoan, and Pacific Islander educational, employment, health, environmental, and cultural issues. He has published scholarly and policy research on Samoan political and cultural change, the meaning and management of water in ancient Hawaii, and sociocultural factors affecting Pacific tuna fisheries. In 2009, he consulted with a leading Samoan chief and the American Samoa Humanities Council on the editing and publication of the territory’s first written history, a required 9th grade textbook. He currently serves as the Director of Institutional Effectiveness at Kapiolani Community College, University of Hawaii. The college bears the name of Queen Julia Kapiolani, the penultimate female monarch of the sovereign nation of Hawaii. He takes primary responsibility for campus strategic and long-term planning, grants writing and development, institutional research, assessment and evaluation, and accreditation. He provides national leadership on diversity and democracy issues for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, American Council on Education, and the Carnegie Foundation. As Senior Faculty Fellow for Community Colleges at Campus Compact, he conducts training, technical assistance and research dissemination in five states per year (38 states and 3 U.S. territories in total). He has presented service-learning workshops at the University of Bologna, Italy, and in Madrid, Spain, and is engaged with Asian scholars in the International Forum for Education in 2020 of the East-West  Center. He provides community college, university, and conference audiences with research-based training designed to improve retention, degree completion, and transfer rates through service-learning, community-based research, and authentic partnerships. His current research and training focuses on service-learning and reducing the minority academic achievement gap, thereby strengthening the liberal arts, workforce development and civic missions of community colleges. He currently serves as a Co-Principal Investigator on three major National Science Foundation grants and as a Faculty Fellow for NSF’s Science and Civic Engagement initiative.

Areas of Expertise